When performing capacity planning for a new service or application, many organizations take a systematic approach. They can perform some detailed analysis of the storage requirements and get capacity planning information from platform vendors to know how many hosts they need and how many of each type of server their new service will require. But asking the same teams how they will approach their performance planning, and they collectively shake their heads. Most accept that, especially in the early stages of the project, there just isn’t a good way to know how the application is going to perform. Many don't know until the workload goes live and gets some traffic to it.

Virtual Instruments announced the release of WorkloadCentral, an early release of a potentially exciting project that gives developers, architects and project managers a tool that can be used to predict how a service will perform. WorkloadCentral is a free, cloud-based service that allows you to upload your proposed (or actual) configuration and get an analysis of that configuration that can be used as a basis for performance expectations.

WorkloadCentral evaluates everything from the software being used to run the workload to the underlying operating system and hardware. Storage vendors, network switches, and even cloud platforms all play a role in how the overall system is going to function. After registering for WorkloadCentral, you can create a virtual playground where you can get an idea about how the service will perform in its proposed configuration, even before you purchase the hardware.

WorkloadCentral is, in a way, the result of the success of Virtual Instruments and a recent merger. Virtual Instruments merged with Load DynamiX in March of this year, and each company brings a specialization that directly applies to the WorkloadCentral release. Virtual Instruments' flagship product, Virtual Wisdom, offers performance and availability analytics across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Load DynamiX Enterprise provides a robust performance analytics platform that includes load generation to spin up a simulation of what you can expect from your application, performance-wise, once the system is being heavily utilized.

Each of those products still is used, and Virtual Instruments hopes that the release of WorkloadCentral becomes a popular entry into the world of performance analytics and application planning. Early planning and performance modeling should lead to better application performance once the project is released. The real-world results and the continuing needs of those organizations will be where the enterprise products will be ready to help, by looking for ways to increase performance and verifying that changes in the code or infrastructure don’t have negative impacts on the application performance.